Well, people, it looks like you can head into the weekend secure in the knowledge that the whole supercomputer race thingy has wound to a close for now. The Dongarra Report hasn't been updated in over a week, so Virginia Tech's "Big Mac" G5-based cluster is still sitting at 10.280 teraflops and will presumably keep that score in the new TOP500 rankings, which will be officially introduced during the Supercomputer Conference starting tomorrow. Considering that Big Mac is the first Macintosh-based supercomputer (Apple's G4 marketing dogma notwithstanding) and it only cost roughly as much as a Super Big Gulp and a pack of Trident gum, it's pretty darn impressive that the thing is apparently going to be ranked third-fastest on the planet. Major props to the big Hokie brains who pulled this off.

Mac users should enjoy Big Mac's third-place standing while we can, since it's probably not going to last for long. The TOP500 list is recalculated every six months, and new supercomputers are being built all the time; indeed, even the mighty 35-teraflop Earth Simulator might lose hold of its massive first-place lead in as little as a year and a half. Faithful viewer The Derekcat notes an Associated Press article about Blue Gene/L, a new supercomputer looking to go live in early 2005; reportedly a test node just cranked out 2 teraflops to rank 73rd on the latest list. And sure, that doesn't sound all that impressive-- until you realize that said node is only one of Blue Gene/L's eventual 128.

We're not kidding: Blue Gene/L will consist of 128 nodes with 1,024 processors each-- that's 131,072 processors for those of you too stunned to do the math-- and reportedly may reach speeds of 360 teraflops. In contrast, Big Mac starts looking like a White Castle slider that got hit with a shrinking ray. The only saving grace, of course, is that at least it's not an x86 cluster: Blue Gene/L is being built by IBM, the same geniuses who made Big Mac the current price/performance leader-- and whose continuing PowerPC development will no doubt make future Power Macs even better suited for use in cheap academic supercomputing clusters.

Indeed, with Virginia Tech reporting off-the-scale interest by other institutions looking to build similar cheap-but-zippy clusters and Power Macs slated to hit 3.0 GHz by the end of the summer, in coming years it'll be Big Mac's kids and grandkids populating the upper reaches of the supercomputing charts-- and for a while, at least, it sounds like Uncle Blue Gene/L will be keeping an eye on them from the top slot. Just one big happy family.